Italian Renaissance Drawings | Art Exhibition

by Anni Leisma

The Renaissance drawing exhibition is the hit of the spring season at the British Museum.

Featuring 100 masterpieces from the collections of the British Museum and the Gabinetto of the Uffizi in Florence, the exhibition brings the drawings together for the first time.

Reading room

The exhibition is in the beautiful setting of the Reading Room in the museum: the high, domed ceiling gives the feeling that you are in an Italian church.

Unfortunately, the layout of the exhibition steals attention from this and the lovely ceiling goes unnoticed for many.

The setting is quite dark, this is partly for the atmosphere but also because some of the drawings are very old and must be protected from direct sunlight.

The exhibition aims to show how drawing became more important towards the end of the 15th century.

No Paper

Before that, the drawing process had not been seen as an essential part of creating a painting, partly because paper was rare and drawings were usually made on vellum (goat or sheep skin).

As paper became cheaper, drawing became more popular and a more established form of art.

Many of the artworks are sketches for frescos and paintings, and were probably never intended to be seen outside the artist’s gallery.

There are many interesting studies about the human body as well as animals, often made for model books. Artists made these for their students so they could learn by copying the drawings.

The exhibition features work by renaissance masters like Da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael as well as many others.

Even though the most popular drawings seem to be the studies by Leonardo, there are many pleasant surprises among the other drawings on display, for instance, the animal drawings from the model books, especially the cheetah by a follower of Giovanni di Grassi circa 1410.

As was the style in the 1400s, most of the paintings are religious.

While these are all excellent examples of the art of that era, the real delights are the rare secular paintings one can find among the religious ones.

Leonardo has an elaborate study of a baby Christ playing with a kitten – sounds random, but the quick sketch proves how amazingly skilled he was in simplifying movement and capturing it in drawings.

The exhibition is widely advertised and is proving to be very popular.

It takes patience to navigate through the crowd, because the drawings are very small and placed thoughtlessly very close together.

It’s hard to get close enough to see and don’t even think about reading the side notes, someone will push you away.

If you are an art student, you have to see this but for someone not that interested in art, this will not turn you into an art lover.

While the exhibition is wonderful in its ability to cover the whole Renaissance period, it also leaves the viewer somewhat indifferent about the drawings themselves.

The British Museum, £10 April 22 - July 25